The Issue That Will Not Fade

When Mathematician Naum Meiman's wife was allowed to leave the Soviet Union to undergo cancer treatment last January, he thought it was a sign that his twelve years as a Jewish refusenik were about to end. But his wife died in Washington a few weeks later, and since then Meiman, 76, a founder of the Soviet human-rights movement, has remained, isolated and in need of surgery he cannot get in the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities point to his once classified work for the Soviet Academy of Sciences 30 years ago as an excuse to prevent him from joining his only relative,...